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A-Z Challenge day 3

Cross stitch has been my greatest hobby for over 25 years now, and even though my eyes are getting worse, I need a special lamp and sometimes even a magnifying glass to work properly, I still love doing it.

True, sometimes I haven´t done anything for a year or two, some projects have been waiting for me to pick them up a long time, but I have always come back to it eventually.

Over the years, I´ve tried my hand in this and that, knitting, crocheting, painting or rather drawing, but it never really worked for me. I liked to draw as a kid, and I guess I was quite good in copying pictures of animals from books or cartoons but I never really developed my own style or a good technique. I´m just not the creative type. Though it´s said that left-handed people are really creative, I am the living example that it is not always true.

But I wanted to do something with my hands, so I tried my hand first on gobelin on prepainted fabric,

Gobelin took me about a year.

that was not bad, but then my mom started a giant cross-stitch- project and at first I said that I could never ever do something like it. She handed me some small kit with 3 flower cards and once I figured it out, I was hooked.

Eventually I met my husband, a british soldier at the time, and through him the beautiful world of english cross-stitch magazines. What bliss! At the time the german ones where just horrible, and they still haven´t improved that much. But I started to do a small picture just to take up a really big one afterwards. It took me about another year to finish but it was well worth it. 🙂

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Over the last 20 years I must have done about a hundred pictures and some tablecloths. Some I have given away as presents, but a fair few are still hanging on the walls of our home. I still love looking at them and it doesn´t get boring at all.

There is so many beautiful cross-stitch kits about, I would have to get at least 200 years old if I wanted to do them all….

I think it is very relaxing unless you make a mistake and have to unpick some stitches, lol. My first pieces looked quite chaotic on the back, nowadays I make sure to work as tidy as possible. Practise makes perfect😊 well maybe not perfect but better anyways 😉

I did cross stitch as my “C” for the challenge, too. 🙂 I tend to stick to much simpler patterns. Yours are beautiful! I envy your ability to work on patterns that are so intricate. That takes patience!

Yes it does, Trish but they are so much fun to do as well 😀 I did start on simpler patterns as well but then it got a bit boring and I needed something more challenging. I just get the patterns that I want hanging in my living room. Sometimes I get a bit scared when I take a look at the chart. But once you get started it gets easier 😉